A mower or harvesting machine of this character has been disclosed, for example, in commonly owned U.S. Pat No. 3,772,865. That patent also teaches the positioning of a deflecting drum in the wake of each disk pair for the purpose of gathering the mown crop into a windrow.
In German printed specification No. 2,023,274 and corresponding U.S. Pat. No. 3,656,284 there has been described a harvesting machine of this type in which a pair of horizontal conditioning rollers, designed to gather and press the freshly cut stalks between them, are disposed rearwardly of a set of four cutting disks and are relatively counterrotated by a single chain linked with the disk drive. The roller surfaces are helically ribbed in a manner tending to concentrate the mown crop along the centerline of the swath cut by the disk array, thus leaving a single row of grass or other stalks intended to turn into hay or silage. One problem with such a transmission is that the driving chain exerts upon the two counterrotating rollers a transverse force urging them toward or away from each other, depending upon the connection between the chain and the associated sprockets, so that it is difficult to maintain a desired pressure therebetween.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,820,311 relates to a different type of mower, using a cutter bar instead of counterrotating disks, in which a pair of conditioning rollers are driven through extensible and universally jointed shafts. The lower conditioning roller is journaled in fixed bearings on the machine frame while the upper roller is adjustable with reference thereto. Power is supplied to the roller shafts through a laterally disposed transmission housing.
The accumulation of the mown crop in a single windrow midway of the swath is sometimes disadvantageous, as when only one pair of cutting disks are used to mow the edge of a field or to cut a narrow swath for some other reason. Also, problems of alignment, oil leakage, lubrication and accessibility arise with laterally mounted transmission systems, especially in a machine using more than two pairs of cutting disks.